Curators
MÔNICA HOFF is an artist, curator, and researcher. Her work investigates the field of relations between curatorial, artistic, and educational practices and how they contribute, resist, and/or determine institutional politics and pedagogies. She holds a PhD in contemporary art process from the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina in Brazil. Between 2006 and 2014, Mônica coordinated the education department of the Bienal del Mercosul in Porto Alegre, where she also acted as part of the curatorial team for its ninth edition, Weather Permitting, in 2013. Recent projects include: Laboratório de Curadoria, Arte e Educação (2014 – 19), in collaboration with Fernanda Albuquerque; Embarcação (2016 – 18) and Escola Extraordinária, both co-directed with Kamilla Nunes in Florianópolis, Brazil; and Corazón Pulmones Hígado (2019 – 20), co-commissioned with Andrea Pacheco at Matadero Madrid. She is currently developing Pedagogia em Público with Fabio Tremonte; coordinating a study group on collectivity, learning, and other forms of institutions with Jessica Gogan; and serving as a guest researcher for the Escuela Desnuda, from Miguel Braceli. She has published the books Pedagogia no campo expandido, with Pablo Helguera, in 2011; Manual para curiosos and the anthology La Nube, with Sofía Hernandez Chong Cuy, in 2013; and in 2018, together with Regina Melim, the Portuguese translation of Tijuana Maid, a novel edited by Martha Rosler in the 1970s.
EVA POSAS is a curator. Working across curatorial and editorial boundaries, she’s interested in the immateriality of language, Zapotec culture, identity, and memory as a form of production. In past projects she has investigated publishing as an articulation of social complexities; storytelling as a form of curating; the connection between public and private spaces; and the politics of subtleness as a subversive methodology through books, exhibitions, and public art projects. She is currently a curator-in-residence at Jan Van Eyck Academie (2020 – 2021).
Faculty
BRIGITTE BAPTISTE is a Colombian biologist who insists that cultural diversity is an expression of nature’s diversity. She has an Honoris Causa PhD in environmental management from the Instituto Universitario de la Paz and is an expert in environmental issues and biodiversity. She was director of the Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt and is currently president of the Universidad Ean, in Bogotá. She graduated from the Universidad Javeriana de Colombia, holds a master's degree in tropical conservation and development from the University of Florida, and completed additional graduate studies in environmental science at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. She currently chairs the Science Policy Advisory Committee of the Inter-American Environmental Initiative for Global Change, is a member of the scientific committee of the global program Ecosystem Change and Society, and is part of the Commission on Ecosystem of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Brigitte is a charismatic speaker, a transgender woman, and an LGBTQI activist. She is married to Adriana Vásquez, with whom she has two daughters: Candelaria and Juana Pasión.
MARÍA BUENAVENUTRA is an artist and cook based in the Bogotá savanna. Her artistic process starts from an ecstasy for the diversity of life as she commits to searching for a free and exuberant way of life for all beings with whom she shares space, breath and food. Her work centers on ideas around territory, small land ownership, and the dietary history of the Tropical Andes: a place of tensions and dispossession buried in the daily struggle of a country of displacement and informality and behind the veil of media outlets which themselves depend on centralized power.
DAWN CHAN is a New York-based writer and editor whose work has been published in the Atlantic, Bookforum, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Village Voice, among other publications. She also frequently contributes to Artforum, where she worked as an editor from 2007 to 2018. Currently on the faculty at CCS Bard, Dawn has lectured at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, and New York University. Anthologized in volumes from Whitechapel/MIT Press, Paper Monument, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg, her writing has also been recognized with a Thoma Foundation art writing award in digital art and a Warhol Arts Writers Grant. In 2019 – 20, Chan was on the curatorial team that organized Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future at Tai Kwun’s JC Contemporary in Hong Kong.
VERÓNICA GAGO holds a doctorate in social sciences from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is a graduate and postgraduate professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín and the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) of Argentina. She coordinates the Grupo de Investigación e Intervención Feminista (GIIF) and the CLACSO working group dedicated to popular economies. She is the author of the books La razón neoliberal: Economías barrocas y pragmática popular (Tinta Limón, 2014), later published in Spain, the United States, Brazil, Bolivia, and France, and La potencia feminista: O el deseo de cambiarlo todo (Tinta Limón, 2019), later published in Spain, the United States, Brazil, Peru, Germany, and France. She is also the co-author (with Luci Cavallero) of Una lectura feminista de la deuda (2019), also published in Brazil, Italy, and Great Britain. She is the editor of various collective volumes, including: 8M: Constelación Feminista and La Internacional Feminista, as well as the author of texts on neoliberalism, feminism, and extractivism.
JUAN LÓPEZ INTZÍN is a Mayan speaker of the Tseltal language (Tenejapa, Chiapas). He has a degree in sociology from the Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas and a master’s degree in social anthropology from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. In 2003 he was part of the team that translated the Acuerdos de San Andrés into the Mayan-Tseltal language, edited by CELALI-CONECULTA. His recent publications include “El Ch’ulel multiverso e intersubjetividad en el stalel Maya Tseltal,” included in Lengua, cosmovisión, intersubjetividad: Acercamientos a la obra de Carlos Lenkersdorf, published by UNAM in 2015. He is co-author of the books Sentipensar el género: Perspectivas desde los pueblos originarios (Sjalel Kibeltik, 2013), Tejiendo nuestras raíces (2010), Ensayos: Memorial de los caminos: Palabras del corazón (CELALI, 2004), El sueño, ¿una herencia de nuestros primeros madres-padres? (CELALI, 2002), and Rumbo a la calle . . . El trabajo infantil, una estrategia de sobrevivencia (2000). He has lectured at New York University, University of Massachusetts, UNAM, and Universidad de Chile, among others. His main axis of reflection is what he has called epistemologies of the heart, where he explores Tseltal and Tsotsil concepts such as Ch’ulel, Ich’el ta muk ’, Lekil Kuxlejal, Stalel kuxlejal, and Sna’el k’inal. He currently works at the Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas.
MAXIMILIANO MAMANI is an Andean artist from Argentina, currently based in Tilcara, Jujuy. He is a dancer and teacher of folk dances. He studied anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de Salta and was a fellow of the National Fund for the Arts of Argentina, allowing him to gain artistic training in Mexico with the director Carlos Antunez. His artistic work is born from the criticism of the colonial matrix that governs our practices, aesthetics, and possibilities of imagining. He ventures into drag with his character "Bartolina Xixa," inspired by the revolutionary leader Bartolina Sisa and the cholas of La Paz. Through Bartolina Xixa, Mamani addresses LGTBQ constructions, coloniality, conceptions of gender and sexual diversity, environmental abuses, racism, violence against women, and the usurpation of territories in Latin America. Through her persona, he establishes a dialogue with his reality and builds a body of work that is part of his own experiences. He is currently working as a butcher in the town of Tilcara.
LUCIANA PARISI researches the intersection of continental philosophy, information sciences, digital media, and computational technologies. Her writings investigate technology in terms of ontological and epistemological possibilities of transformation in culture, aesthetics, and politics. She was a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and is currently a co-founding member of CCB (Critical Computation Bureau), through which she co-ideated the Symposium on Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence, and Speculative Computation (2020). In 2004 she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology, and the Mutations of Desire, which investigates capitalist experimentations in molecular strata of nature and conceptions of sex and gender in terms of bacterial sex. Her book Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (2013) explores algorithms in architecture and interaction design. Her current project, Automating Philosophy (forthcoming), explores radical critiques starting with inhuman intelligence and cosmocomputations.
JD PLUECKER works with language, writes, translates, organizes, interprets, and creates. In 2010, they co-founded the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire and in 2015 the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. JD’s undisciplinary work is informed by experimental poetics, language justice, radical aesthetics / politics, and cross-border / cross-language cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including most recently Gore Capitalism by Sayak Valencia (Semiotext(e), 2018) and Antígona González by Sara Uribe (Les Figues Press, 2016). Their book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press. JD is a member of the Macondo Writing Workshop and has exhibited work at Blaffer Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, Project Row Houses, and more.
SIDARTA RIBEIRO is a professor of neurosciences and deputy director of the Instituto do Cérebro of the Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. He holds a degree in biology from the Universidade de Brasilia (1993), a master's degree in biophysics from the Universidade Federal de Río de Janeiro (1994), a PhD in animal behavior from Rockefeller University (2000), and a post-doctorate in neurophysiology from Duke University (2005). He has a background in neuroethology, molecular neurobiology, and systems neurophysiology, with an interest in the following topics: memory, sleep, and dreams; neuronal plasticity; vocal communication; symbolic competence in nonhuman animals; computer psychiatry; neuroeducation; psychedelics and drug policy. He is currently director of the Sociedad Brasileña para el Avance de la Ciencia, 2018 – 21. From 2009 to 2011 he served as secretary of the Sociedad Brasileña de Neurociencias y Comportamiento, and between 2011 and 2015 as coordinator of the Brazilian committee of the Pew Latin American Fellows Program in Biomedical Sciences. Since 2011 he has been a member of the steering committee of the Latin American School for Education, Cognitive, and Neural Sciences (LA School). He is a senior associate researcher at Centro de Investigación de Innovación y Difusión en Neuromatemática de la FAPESP; scientific coordinator of the Plataforma Brasileña de Políticas de Drogas, and member of the advisory council of the Instituto Chacruna de Plantas Medicinales Psicodélicas.
THE SENSING SALON is the collaborative practice of Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva.
DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA is a philosopher, writer, and filmmaker. Her academic and artistic works address the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), A Divida Impagavel (2019), and Unpayable Debt (2021) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013). Her artistic work includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and The Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓ əm) people.
VALENTINA DESIDERI explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003 – 2006), later earned her MA in fine arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011 – 13), and is currently a PhD candidate at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizers of Performing Arts Forum in France. She speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she participates in Poethical Readings and organizes The Sensing Salon with Denise Ferreira da Silva, she is part of the Oficina de Imaginação Política, and she reads and writes.
